You should also read this one. The piece on the Fates Warning is very well done. I secretly dread having to write in earnest about these records, it could be said that the rest of Poetry of Subculture is a warm-up to that, and here the blog author Zero has not only tackled them in his first post, but done an inspiring job of it too. Inspiring as in, only-person-on-the-internet-to-do-it-justice-so-far inspiring. Honestly, I'd recommend this blog even if due to unforseen circumstances this were the only post on it, though naturally I hope for the opposite. I am very interested on what other records will be discussed and in what way.
As I often say, I do not write here in order to make friends or socialize and it seems to me often that when bloggers cross-post there's something unhealthy about the resultant back-patting, yes, why thank you, you too, splendid splendid. But I honestly do believe Zero's writing is deserving of your interest so I hope you'll excuse me the exception.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Burzum - Hvis Lyset Tar Oss
I have nothing to offer you that is real. This isn't a review of a record. It will neither confirm nor contradict your bias as to the quality or character of "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss", Burzum, or the person behind these names. You will not leave Poetry of Subculture any more secure in your preconceptions, nor will you feel wiser & tolerant for having briefly weighed a different point of view against yours.
It's startling to me now, when I allow myself to consider the reasons people write about externalities such as rock and roll records on the internet. It wasn't always so, naturally. I have just forgotten. As a teenager reading Metal Hammer magazines and fanzines the intent and function of the reviewing process was automatically clear to me: I am reading this because I trust the writer's taste and I have this pocket money to spare on a couple of records, eventually. I might not buy the record this particular review is raving on about, but I am at least massing relevant information to the genres of interest to me and building a cohesive internal map of Heavy Metal. I am domesticating this wilderness. Decades later I will be drawing up little historical/aesthetic maps of Heavy Metal and posting them on the internet and in the comments there shall be a discussion about Judas Priest and irony. But years before that, my scavenging in reviews will not only lead to purchases and the primary enjoyment of music, but also to a secondary boon in self-characterization. If I know so much about Heavy Metal, then surely that's worth something in some social circles. My hair has become very long and my stare austere. What do you mean you haven't yet listened to Ostrogoth's "Full Moon's Eyes", you pretender? Do you realize that men have died so you can sing that chorus? Return to me when you are of a higher level.
The reviewer also I automatically understood, once: they are communicating their love for their field of study - empowering in itself, for a love unrequited becomes a stone on which paranoia will build. "Do I really feel it if I cannot express it?". The love's acceptance is so intoxicating in fact, that it may outlive the love itself. One may become a professional in writing love letters. I have received this promo CD, it is not bad nor it is especially good, yet something inside me compels me to write pretty words about it. People will respect me for it, I shall hate myself for it.
The reviewer is also reaping the social benefits of being learned in a field, in any field. Most people know even less than nothing, so, longhair'd dark-eyed gazers in the dark, you'll do for teachers too, perhaps for a while. They're exerting power over their students, they're reaping the benefits of many lonely days spent searching in warehouses full of moldy LP's and poring over mail-order lists. Do you realize the sadness in a man in his forties writing record reviews about new metal cds? Someone has to do it! I concede to them that the trade of some power for this sadness is a fair one.
So I became a knowledgeable person in Heavy Metal also and I reaped, perhaps, some similar benefits for my risky commitment, a trade for a small sadness. It has been a few years since I last thought of myself (and of the reviewing process) in this light. I have forgotten the use of all of that because I realized that life's running out and the risk of being "a record reviewer" is too large for the dubious benefits left to be gained. It is because my love for Heavy Metal is true that I felt I had to stop. Abandonment of something loved being a source of much pain for my particular psyche, it could never be a choice I could be proud of, so instead of dropping the whole thing, I re-purposed my efforts in my love for this music outwards and initially became a commentator on foreign blogs and forums (where I thought, I had no power), trying to achieve communication that stepped aside from the usual social gaming that metalheads engage in in open forums. My alias of "Helm" was never meant to become a persona, it was meant as a diversion from the ego. I didn't want to make new friends (who call me "Helm" instead of Telemachus) or to be respected for my knowledge or opinions on all things Heavy Metal. I wanted my output to provoke response on a specific level, one I found lacking in the discourse surrounding metal music. I wanted exposition and risk. I wanted people to talk about their own truths, not the communal truth. This was to be a small return for past power and some social integration granted to me for wasting so much of my childhood internalizing Heavy Metal records. I think I've had a couple of girlfriends that liked my metalhead looks and austere gaze, after all.
I succeeded for a time but failed, ultimately, in this endeavor for 'metalhead expressionism' for various reasons having to do with that I am after all somewhat socially impaired and a difficult person to extend good will towards. It became clear that what I was attempting to do was doubly difficult to achieve on foreign soil and that I should instead pretend as if I have built a castle like all the other reviewers do and have the faithful flock to me (after all when you click on through to the blog, you are preemptively giving me a position of authority). I find this funny and sad because it is a diversion. There is no wisdom here, there is only an open question and I require your answers. What is Heavy Metal to you? This is what it is to me. Please let me know. That's what this blog is here for.
This is a reminder then that I am not a grand wizard, I have nothing true to say, and I do not need admirers or antagonists (pretty much the same thing). If you've read up to this, both in this text on on Poetry of Subculture on the whole, you probably suspect as much. I hope you can forgive me every time I speak with a voice of authority and still remind me that you exist and are different to me. I have created this blog not for gathering of power but for the discourse of it. I am a man with just a lantern for possessions, I sleep in a tub, so on. I will not carry the allegory further, cultured ones.
There's nothing to say about this record. It doesn't exist. It has never existed. I have forgotten the stories surrounding it. I do not know the name of the one who summoned it, nor do I know where he's from. I do not listen to it and see, in my mind's eye, treetops of a northern sort or any other cataloged flora. I see spectral leaves, iridescent in the darkness, lit as if from inside, stretching towards the stars, pointing towards the unknown. All your life you have been taught you are a mirror that reflects the radiance of authority and educators, that your societies give you meaning and purpose. That your imaginations and dreams are byproducts of your socialization. Art such as this stands perfected, dead, forever, a testament to the fallacy of that modernist model of life and the radiance of inner ambition. What you desire is what all life has desired, you have been taught nothing in your waking hours but appropriation, construing and deconstruction in a confused tongue.
We look at the tree bark and we touch it and we can discern a volume and a presence, but as we are ephemeral we can only measure worth in ephemeral ways as well. How will this tree serve me in my lifetime? It may provide some shade today. Tomorrow it may be firewood. My body can be nourished by this and all other products available to me while my mind wonders in increasing horror towards the end. This record also, I hear a racist murderer recorded it. It may provide entertainment for me today, and tomorrow I shall have an animate discussion on the internet about whether such a racist murderer deserves my hard-earned patronage for his artistry. I measure myself in ephemeral currency, and I shall soon be dead.
The trees I dream of when I listen to this record have existed for so long, they are from before time, before 'to exist' has been the sought prize of the lightbringer, he who taught men to measure all things in terms humane by stealing from the gods. The notes, a length of string cut from the thread of destiny. The harmonies like quantum reverberations, in many universes alike but different only slightly (and noisy!): not one might gave this any conscious thought, they are just there. And rhythm, at last there we find the man, endlessly restless and driving towards something, some destination. What is that destination? Tomhet.
There is no desire that this music communicates besides the quest for teliosis, the love of death itself, the shedding of the ephemeral. There is nothing real here. The naked screams that tell tales, so blatant as to be rarely mentioned in 'reviews' and almost never directly referenced by the legions of followers of the product dubbed "Burzum", never seemed to me the voice of human anguish. They originated there, surely. But now, millennia after this art has existed, if there is any pain here, it is fossilized. If the tree's roots grow and encroach upon the domain of weaker plants who lingered too much in the shade, their cry would be similar. If the rock, sundered by mindless lightning has a voice, it is this as well. If there was a human once, that screamed words into a microphone, he is long since gone. Nobody knows his name. Isn't it strange if you are in your twenties and you feel as if you're older, perhaps illogically old? Perhaps you have died before you were born?
The man that made this music didn't have anything to say to me about race or politics. If we wanted once, some structure to the chaos he inherited, I am certain that he himself views his ramshackle temple to consequence, to logic, as a humorous, sad thing. Instead his art, it says all there is to say in wordless speak. I am sure that that man wonders, why do people keep asking him for answers when he has posited the only question worth pursuing in his art? That so many believe words-in-a-row doesn't lend any truth to them. Belief is not truth. And yet they keep asking, drawn like moths to the flame of death. What can you tell us, murderer, about anything, anything at all? You can with your blood power, make a discussion about guitar pedals vital again, you can make it real? The only thing we fear is death, therefore death is real.
Hvis Lyset Tar Oss doesn't fear death, it welcomes it as part of the circle. It is therefore, not real in any way we use the word today. You have been given back what knowledge you've always possessed. Is it enough for you, this inspiration? What of its implications, can you count how many ends this thread leads to? Can you feel it in your heart or do we really have to talk about small deaths of introvert teenagers in a privileged society where boredom is the ultimate despair? Will that make this real? Don't you know about all that already?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Saviour Machine - Saviour Machine I
Self-released in 1993
Jeff Clayton: Guitars
Eric Clayton: Vocals
Dean Forsyth: Bass
Samuel West: Drums
Shadows may follow the man
One thing is leading the others
Follow the veil in my hand
Nothing deceiving my brothers
Look into my eyes, walk into my vision
Drift upon the streams, enter vast dominions
Welcome to my dream
Heavy Metal seeks to impose a reality. Pathos and drama presented as a spectacle meant not only to entertain, but to ensnare the hypothetical listener. Though we defecate most of what we consume, something must linger, time after time, something builds inside and affects in such a way that we cannot be said to have a capitalist transaction with it but instead an uneasy symbiosis.
The curious thing about the many realities that live inside us is that as roads to awe, they return endlessly in on themselves. Though there are higher places they might lead to briefly, they are not real, that is to say, they can not be communicated as a reality, they cannot be made stable and they cannot be graphed. The wilderness cannot be domesticated. The ultimate end of romantic art is a vague sense of inspiration, for what? Towards what?
It is no wonder that when pressed for it, most listeners of extreme music (or Heavy Metal in particular if you prefer) cannot quantify what it is they take from the music. They often attempt to divert the argument by exclaiming how if they were to try, words would cheapen that unquantifiable "it" that they return to. Whereas this might speak as to the lingual limitations of metalheads (or modern pop culture consumers broadly), it also betrays that there is something there that is worth protecting, something that the speaker feels tenderly about and that they will take special note not to blemish with easy talk, a fire they will not disgrace with lesser offerings. Can the gods, in 2011, still be angered by impudence?
As I've mentioned in the past, Heavy Metal music is so potent for a certain breed of teenager introvert because it seems so insular, so determined not to be scrutinized by outsiders and those who are false of spirit. Whatever meaning and inspiration the young listener takes from their favorite Heavy Metal records, they must wrestle the ghost, their "summoned entity". Look on the cover of "Live after Death" and tell me if you can battle the reanimated horror on the cover for his secrets of life and death. Do you dare?
Heavy Metal is not an easy friendship. If it were a bond it would eventually be akin to that of brothers (as the Manowar-speak, for all its gross commercial application, is not chosen in error), for as brothers quarrel and antagonize, they are also tied with illogical bonds of blood. To discover the potency of Heavy Metal, blood must flow. Again I am reminded of a thread on a metal forum where a man of at least three completed decades was railing against some other, more Dionysian black metal fan, whom exclaimed they like their beers and pussy in their metal. "Such things have no place in metal" he replied sternly, wizard glasses pressed closer to his eyes, "it is only meant for dark occult magickal studies". Do you realize how much a person has to suffer for Heavy Metal to say this, straight-faced, to the world? How much his early experience of growing up and his interpersonal relationships have been colored by the solitary ingress that some undead beast on a metal album cover inspired?
If you wonder how metalheads can be at once so elitist and insecure, start by examining their priorities in their teen age, as compared to their peers.
The paradigm of the mad alchemist up in their tower, concocting strange mixtures they only when they have felt them perfected do they intend to make public is another one I often employ. There's a mad brilliance in going through all the trouble to make a dense, unparsable artifact of romance, drop it in the culture flow, watch it sink like a stone to the dark depths below and then exclaim with pride "many will drown for years to reach the beauty I have created, and this is just as well!". I've been listening to, writing about and composing Heavy Metal for what is increasingly more of a candidate to be described as a "long time" (you know this once you realize more than half your life, and certainly all of the life that was worth it, has been spent around molten steel) and at the above description my heart still resonates warmly. It is I, I will dive into the mirror pool and I will unearth your beauty, or I will willingly drown and be forgotten, that is my gut response.
I believe most artists are secretly jealous of their listeners who reach the closest to the inscrutable core of majesty that they have - perhaps - by accident conjured. You, the close listener and appreciator of Heavy Metal, are neither friend nor brother to the musician that has created it, you are an usurper. They will begrudgingly tolerate and accept you for your patronage, perhaps. And if you show some free-standing merit of your own they will call you friend perhaps, but be certain, romance is a cruel mistress, it yearns for holocaust. The mad lover will kill every suitor first and then themselves to slide between her thighs.
As love will die within the force
That drains is from the grail
She drinks the blood of prophets
And she drinks the blood of saints
Between her legs they crawl in torment
For the souls they lay to waste
Upon the altar, the sacrifice begins
The dragon takes another, and feeds upon his sins
To live and breathe again
I have argued that Heavy Metal is a solipsist reflex. What beauty is there that you found, you stole, so on. Capitalist terms can and have explained the transaction of such art. Where did you buy your first Heavy Metal record, anyway? Did you climb a mountain for it? Did you cross unknown lands? Of course not. However romanticism has a slightly different aspect to it that cannot be explained in the words of commerce, one cunningly complementary to the main thrust of pathos, the lust for death, that is so infinitely marketable. In order to kill one must create. The romantic desires power to affect, to shape the outer as a testament to the control of the inner. This world must burn, must be raised to the ground and then the destroyer shall rebuild it in great splendor. This betrays that the outer shell, so distrusted and maligned by the dark hearts dreaming in the darkness, now in their thirties and still dreaming of 'occult studies' in their small bedrooms while their mother sleeps just a cold wall away, is something of importance. The romantic desires the world to enter them, they desire for themselves to have a place in the world. They only way for the romantic to achieve anything, really, is through sacrifice. All art for them is a sacrifice, even if the smoke that rises to the night sky, heavy with the vitality of burned flesh is meant for an unfathomable shade, a spectral god that nobody can really identify, a symbol of the great self.
Come before the sacred heart and sacrifice the mind
Come before the silent invitation to the signs
Let us enter frightened ones, suppress the need to hide
Let us cross the river's streams unto the other side
Out in the distance of all time and space
As the Force of the Entity reigns
The process of creating art is in this light a process of diminishing the self, cutting off the offering to burn, and then instead of waste in dissipation (which, in lack of monetary returns, is the only way the Capitalist can describe the act of creation), the hope is of impregnation of the outer world. It could be said that the only reason society tolerates the mad shaman, the reclusive poet and the drunken writer of low repute is because in the end, in how they offer to their higher, dreaming selves, they offer to everyone else as well. The act of creation, even if meant in the narrowest egotistical sense, is inescapably a step outside the self. It is illogical as it is economically counter-intuitive.
Heavy Metal often is concerned with satanic or demonic forces and much is made of that. The most popular modern interpretation of what the impulse for bands to glorify dark forces might signify is comfortably capitalist. Praising satan, the light-bringer, is to praise individuality and personal accomplishment. All these satanic bands can be read as if they're rational egotists, effectively creating monuments to their own imagined greatness. If you can sell it, then it must exist.
Elements of this reading I've often endorsed and felt to be true with stipulations. However in discussing the curious case of Saviour Machine, a band often considered to be 'christian metal', I have to discuss how the exception underlines the rule. What if in the glorification of any higher force (as satan, or the old gods surely are) is more important than the identity of the entity and its ethical demeanor (if any)? Is there truly such a great difference between those that glorify Azazoth and those that plead for communion with the Pantocrator?
White metal and black metal, the difference can be argued to be an aesthetic. It is the small mind that immediately rejects one of two siblings because they are wearing the wrong colours, in the end they are so much alike. The impulse of both is the offering to awe, a minor transcendence that connects all living beings through hope.
Follow me in madness, follow me in fear
Touch me in your silence, rape me in your tears
Let the sea sadness free the chosen one
Legacy of horror, manifest the son
If there is a God that Saviour Machine are calling towards in their debut album, its face is obscured by the killing light, much like Apollo, much like the great devil, Satan, much like the visage of the sun itself. Tributes to the eldest of all gods, do they bring us together or tear us apart? Saviour Machine do not urge you to join a church, nor do they have any judgment of non-believers to offer. Their faith is in freedom itself, an existential teliosis. Their burnt offering cannot be described in commercial terms because it has not moved me to either endorse any superficial creed or belief system. It has only inspired in me to keep on living, to create in turn and offer what I can, hoping to unlock something of myself I dread to realize exists. It can be said that Romance, the most selfish of fervors, leads to this.
There's no ephemeral salvation here (if anything this is a tortured record) but an inspiration of more lasting impact. The language used is universal, the symbols employed can be understood by any man of any creed. The message is as clear as it has ever been: to find oneself one must risk, they must create, and to create one must sacrifice with no small desires of immediate returns, only that though many drown in the darkness of their ingress, the few will find a way to unearth their capacity, a freedom that has been given back though always possessed.
Without hate, without pain
Without suffering insane
Without death, without fire
Without lies that feed the liar
Without war, without games
Without fear to take the blame
Without fame, without power
Without drugs to heal the coward
Without violence, without rape
Without sickness, without plagues
Without judgment, without crime
Without hope, without time
Without two, without three
Without torture over belief
Bring us love
Let us see
Set us Free
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Fifteen years of accumulated spring cleaning
In sight of a theoretical moving out, I've finally started making practical steps. I've wanted to let go of the plastic for a while now, so that's what's left. If you were ever in doubt on my commitment to essentiality, here you go.
I felt remarkably little remorse throwing out the CDs themselves. CDs aren't beautiful. I kept my meager vinyl because it is. I plan, in my new place, to create a wall-of-art with the more striking of the cd booklets, but then again, I might not do that at all. I've lived a long time in this house/room and it had been overcompressed with little trinkets, toys and memorabilia for the larger part of that duration. When I get a new place I intend for very spartan interior design, at least for a couple of years.
Here's a few interesting thoughts that came with taking out the trash:
1. Curiously, some of my CDs have been breeding in the piles. I apparently have two "Lost Paradise" CDs by Paradise Lost, two "Invictus" copies by Virgin Steele and two of "Red" by King Crimson. Also three different print copies of Psychotic Waltz's "A Social Grace", but at least I remember how that happened. Not the rest.
2. Fuck, I bought a lot of trash when I was younger. I have Exxplorer's "coldblackugly" in here somewhere (and Symphonies of Steel, thankfully, but still). Probably the most putrid thing in here was however, and somehow twice, Jag Panzer's "Dissident Alliance". I do not remember having bought either of them.
3. I had a *lot* of cover compilations from various magazines. Turns out I remember most of the songs on them extremely well. I must have listened to them nearly as much if not more than I did real records. I'd never do that nowadays.
4. Melissa is still the best heavy metal cover.
5. I have absolutely none of the collector genes my brother and father seem to have in spades. For this I am thankful for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not enjoy the feeling of nostalgia, generally. In an indirect way this is also connected with how I'm trying to take positive steps forward in my life (the moving out is just part of that mindset) and being tied down with fifteen years of CD weight is something to be liberated of, definitely.
6. Once I got through the CD piles, I started tearing down posters and removing small items of no consequence that had accumulated through decades of teenage entropy. I threw away bad comics, I gave bad books to my dad (as he cannot bear the thought of throwing away books), I seriously didn't stop until I ran out of garbage bags. I wish I had more of them, actually. It's a good feeling. I'll finish up this project in the coming week. I intend to leave this room as bare as I arrived in it.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Progressive metal -- Attempt at a Definition
This has been swimming in my mind from when I read Jeff Wagner's book on the subject of Progressive Metal. I got a real handle on it a couple of weeks ago as I was playing choice cuts from the genre for my girlfriend. I tied down the nascent description I'm about to present to exact musical quotes and this helped in solidifying my theory. I'll try to do the same here, though keep in mind I'm still working out the implications.
So, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Progressive metal has been defined literally to mean "metal (or metal-esque) music intent on constantly changing/evolving' for decades now and it's a favorite pastime of pony-tailed metalheads to argue about how a band is truly Progressive (or merely 'progressive' or 'prog') so why mess with it and them? Because that definition doesn't work, even worse, because it's pathological. In the popular conception, Progressive metal owes to its name to keep on moving forward, ultimately further and further away from its 'Heavy Metal base' and further away from the archetype into curious reconfigurations that constantly push the envelope, any envelope. This is a recipe for disappointment if there ever was one and it's very curious, psychologically, why people would obsess over their favorite bands eventually becoming something different from what made them their favorites to begin with. After all "inclined to constantly progress" is not a positive or negative attribute in itself, it isn't something one can love and attach themselves emotionally to. It is to what one progresses towards that could possibly be the attraction point for the listener, but then, even if the band reaches that initial promise, the mandate of "Progressive" demands that they then discard it and move on. It's schizophrenic. But that - the psychological profile of the pony-tailed metalhead and his mock (I contend) desire for ever-forward moving progress - can wait a while.
I think Progressive metal, as we've experienced it from 1986 to roughly the end of the '90s is actually defined by very different things than what are popularly accepted. Metalheads have this curious incapacity, well, perhaps not incapacity, perhaps it's a lack of desire, but anyway, they don't want to consider the social context that shaped the subgenre variations of Heavy Metal they're devoted to. It's as if speed metal, then thrash and power metal, then progressive metal, were destined to come into existence because the Metal Gods willed it so and that's as musicological one has to get about it. Do you like it? That's the issue for them, not how or why something came to be exactly. Jeff Wagner took a brave step outside of this mentality in his book by tracing the musical lineage of Progressive Metal to its rock counterpart, but there's more there, I think.
Rush is a big deal for Progressive metal, so thinks Jeff Wagner and so do I as well. But besides the obvious technical chops and lengthy compositions of the band, we can take a sideways look into Rush and explain what Progressive metal really is about. The Canadian trio is considered the forefather of most, if not all things Progressive Metal for the straightforward reason that the forefathers of that genre (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Watchtower but not Queensryche, who were influenced by them only by a degree of separation through Iron Maiden) are all professed fans of the band and because traces of their music of Rush can be directly found in most of these bands material. It's not high musicology, 'Ytse Jam' sounds like 'YYZ', there you go.
However, Rush were not a band infinitely bent on progress, and even if they gave that illusion during the one quantum leap in their '70s discography between the first two records and what came after, or if we're lax and consider their shift of sound towards the more streamlined, techno-pop of their '80s material a move in that same progress, it still then ended. In fact, that '80s shift in Rush is I think, emotionally, the crux of modern proghead mentality. '80s Rush found their final, adult sound and have occupied that niche since then. Progheads keep hoping that an equivalent adult metal sound will be found, but no such thing exists so far.
Furthermore, keep in mind that when Progressive Metal was in its heyday, Rush have been putting out the same record for half a decade already. Rush as an inspiration was not to push the Progressive Metal stalwarts towards infinite progress (what we instead came to call 'Avant-Garde Metal' instead, for good or worse), so... what?
It was the gradual move from the fantastic, romantic and solipsist (the domain of Heavy Metal, now and forever) towards the modernist and humanist that Rush started. Rush were an inspiration to young metalheads in the late '80s to attempt to write songs about their real and current human situation. Rush, for every 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog', for every 'Necromancer', also presented (Ayn Rand inspired, curiously but not surprisingly) paeans towards self-will and actualization, allegories towards surviving modernity and even negotiating singular identity in a mass-consumption world. These are concerns that every sentient being in the modern world has to deal with, and that's what Progressive Metal tried to introduce into the Heavy Metal cannon. The psychological reasons for such a violent shift of context in metal music in the latter part of the '80s has to do, I theorize, with the increased outsider interest in the genre and the market pressure on it. As I've said many times before, metal music felt that in the spotlight, it had to come up with something 'grownup' to say. This may sound damning but I do not necessarily think that nothing useful and artistically vital could come from such pretensions of adulthood. If anything, those that got the worst of it were not the musicians that created Progressive metal masterpieces but the naive progheads that structured their identity on the basis that their 'grown-up metal' was better than everything that came before it. Progressive metal was an open question but yet it was percieved as a final answer by many.
I've said this in different ways on Poetry of Subculture and other places, but never so clearly and directly. Progressive Metal (of that ten year period, modern prog is a different matter, which we'll get to) is not focused on endless forward movement as an end in itself, it is about the introduction of modernist themes that deal with the social human condition while using Heavy Metal tropes to achieve energy and direction. That modernist concerns are inherently confusing and sap willpower, whereas Heavy Metal music is inherently simplistic and directive are contradictions of intent and form is very much apparent and at the core of the genre.
To qualify my statements we'll have to look at a few disambiguating examples. First, let's think a bit on technicality. Much is constantly made about Progressive Metal being the technical frontier for not just metal musics but rock instrumentation music in general. Indeed if one listens to Watchtower or even Dream Theater's debut (1988-9 releases) there isn't much in popular rock music that offered such pyrotechnical display. However jazz and fusion musics were miles ahead, even then, in the pursuit of intricacy as raison d'etre. Perhaps today the two fields have been largely equalized, but listening to say, Tribal Tech, back in 1989 would put the rigid ditties of Dream Theater in some perspective. Furthermore, in the metal field it could be said that the true frontier for technical intricacy had been pushed by the many children of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, in the 'shred' sub-genre. Or from a different vantage, the barrier for information density had always been the domain of technical death metal, not Progressive Metal itself.
Could Progressive Metal players of 1985-1995 play even flashier, more dense, more intricately? That question is diverting from the important fact that even if they could, they didn't. Progressive metal, especially in its infancy, was flashy, but not too flashy. They were trying to do something with their chops that wasn't devoted to the chops themselves. They were using modern technique and equipment to express modern themes and considerations. There were much more technically obsessed types of music than Progressive Metal in that period and its only due to musically illiterate fans (it's true, the elitist progheads usually can't tell consonance from dissonance, they can only tell when 'there's a lot of notes') that the reputation of Prog is primarily one of technical overindulgence. One needs only compare a Dream Theater instrumental with any given top-player fusion jam session to see the difference in focus. Progressive Metal overplays like a nerdy but bright pre-grad university student trying to attack a subject they have burning interest in from every which way. And that interest was the human condition. Naturally, a sophomoric atmosphere is inherent in much Progressive metal due to this, but even that can have its charm.
The other issue I have to tackle is the mythos of Progressive Metal constantly having to move forward to dignify its moniker. This is a trip many Progressive Metal musicians of the early '00s (the decade of post-modern self-reflection for metal) fell into as well, eventually taking their bands and aspirations completely outside the field. Fans rejected most of these bands for their 'betrayal' while at the same time still considering the need for ever-forward progress as the definition of the sub-genre they so loved. This must have been confusing for musicians and listeners alike. Bands that have enjoyed the interest of Progressive Metal fans have instead kept to a narrower path. Dream Theater is the most striking example of a Progressive Metal band that is very conservative, almost never moves forward. But even slightly outre bands like Fates Warning, have enjoyed their lasting success for keeping to a general formula of Progressive Metal. Bands on the fast track to actual progress, like Mayfair or Depressive Age, were finished with metal in the span of one or two records. There's a reason for this: Heavy Metal can do only a few things, but it does these things great. If you try to make it hit different beats, it's a lot of work for relatively few returns. Eventually the struggling musician realizes they can actually achieve the moods they're going for without depending on distortion, solos and double bass, and they morph into the electronica or post-punk or whatever else outfit they needed to be anyway. Those that keep the metal tropes are doing it because they still love Heavy Metal for its romantic core, and that's not 'Progressive' at all.
So that's the tension inside Progressive Metal circa 1985-1995, romantic tools in the service of modernist goals. The genre was bound to suffer commercial death early on with such a volatile tension in its core. Rush circumvented implosion by dropping the romantic tropes of grand compositions and overplaying arrogance by the '80s and instead found the contemporary rock niche in which they could explore their modernist concerns and they grew a whole second audience for it.
So what of modern (post '90s) Progressive Metal? Or, to put it as its now known, "prog". That's second generation music that has had to deal with the confusion I describe above and it has had to take a stand on what it wants to be in light of such information. Most of it has tried to be all things at the same time: hyper-technical, yet constantly bastardizing the metal with outside influences, both completely left-field and at the same time rigidly conservative when it comes to Heavy Metal play structure and composition. The end result is schizophrenic: imagine Meshuggah covering U2 while Tangerine Dream supplies keyboard drones. Some people like that type of music, I personally can't stand to listen to it for long because it hasn't made a choice of focus, instead it has made its focus to not have to commit to a choice. This is the perfect music, psychologically, for people who suffer from delusions of grandeur and/or enjoy self-validation by how elite their hobbies are. At any case, not a good path in life.
Humanist arts are necessarily wimpy. They're not tough, or macho. In fact, the forces behind such stances are under the critical eye of humanism. Chauvinism, racism, sexism, inherent philosophical aspects of most romantic ways of thinking are deconstructed in every way by modernist arts. That is after all, their purpose. Watchtower have nothing in common with Exodus or any other beer-thrash band. If anything, Watchtower felt they are here to destroy this conception of what Heavy Metal music is. Now that all that stuff's in the past it's easier to see it in a docile light, but the minor revolution of Progressive metal was that it was flamboyantly weird, wimpy, nerdy... even gay, at times. Modern progressive metal that tries to be all things for all people all the time is terrified of being gay and wimpy and weird predominantly. It thinks the way to counteract that aspect of its identity is by slapping on Pantera and Meshuggah riffs to keep the image 'tough', it's schizophrenic.
Let's listen to this, the quintessential Progressive metal song, and see if we can find anything even remotely 'tough' in it:
This is not at all manly. As intercourse, this is erratic and interrupted. As rhetoric it's rambling and multifaceted, fractured thoughts going every which way. Driving pulse is sacrificed for scope and color. This song goes in many directions and it most importantly takes the most roundabout route to its destination. This is the essence of Progressive metal. It's the audio version of a painting such as this:
That struggles so not to say one thing in the most direct and clear manner, but instead to convey as many aspects of a situation, with its many actors and disparities and often even illogicality. Of course this high concept is wimpy! Machismo is a simple and heavy concept, a bold red color that destroys nuance and detail, it has no place on the page. Listen to that fractured riff, modulated through many keys and rhythms, as if Fates Warning are trying to present it in as many ways as possible, leaving it to the listener to decide, in dialogue with it. Of course the guitar sound is hollower (Rush producer being no accident) and lower in the mix, so that every voice in the mix is equal. Democracy, such an incompatible notion in dynastic Heavy Metal, yet, here it is. From this song to everything vaguely Progressive metal that came out in its shadow, these concepts and concerns are clear and bright to the educated listener.
This means that it's possible to make Progressive metal as such even today, and still keep to the formula. Indeed many bands do. The clarity of the approach should be judged on the modernist grace of the music, not on whether it's overtechnical, genre-bending or all-things-at-once carnival music. Progressive metal is judged on how it utilizes composition to augment its modern program. As the concerns of modernity have not been assuaged (and never will) so will every living popular music have a fringe aspect dedicated to it. Literal-minded metalheads will eventually need to develop the knowledge and language to understand what it is Progressive metal tried to do.
So, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Progressive metal has been defined literally to mean "metal (or metal-esque) music intent on constantly changing/evolving' for decades now and it's a favorite pastime of pony-tailed metalheads to argue about how a band is truly Progressive (or merely 'progressive' or 'prog') so why mess with it and them? Because that definition doesn't work, even worse, because it's pathological. In the popular conception, Progressive metal owes to its name to keep on moving forward, ultimately further and further away from its 'Heavy Metal base' and further away from the archetype into curious reconfigurations that constantly push the envelope, any envelope. This is a recipe for disappointment if there ever was one and it's very curious, psychologically, why people would obsess over their favorite bands eventually becoming something different from what made them their favorites to begin with. After all "inclined to constantly progress" is not a positive or negative attribute in itself, it isn't something one can love and attach themselves emotionally to. It is to what one progresses towards that could possibly be the attraction point for the listener, but then, even if the band reaches that initial promise, the mandate of "Progressive" demands that they then discard it and move on. It's schizophrenic. But that - the psychological profile of the pony-tailed metalhead and his mock (I contend) desire for ever-forward moving progress - can wait a while.
I think Progressive metal, as we've experienced it from 1986 to roughly the end of the '90s is actually defined by very different things than what are popularly accepted. Metalheads have this curious incapacity, well, perhaps not incapacity, perhaps it's a lack of desire, but anyway, they don't want to consider the social context that shaped the subgenre variations of Heavy Metal they're devoted to. It's as if speed metal, then thrash and power metal, then progressive metal, were destined to come into existence because the Metal Gods willed it so and that's as musicological one has to get about it. Do you like it? That's the issue for them, not how or why something came to be exactly. Jeff Wagner took a brave step outside of this mentality in his book by tracing the musical lineage of Progressive Metal to its rock counterpart, but there's more there, I think.
Rush is a big deal for Progressive metal, so thinks Jeff Wagner and so do I as well. But besides the obvious technical chops and lengthy compositions of the band, we can take a sideways look into Rush and explain what Progressive metal really is about. The Canadian trio is considered the forefather of most, if not all things Progressive Metal for the straightforward reason that the forefathers of that genre (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Watchtower but not Queensryche, who were influenced by them only by a degree of separation through Iron Maiden) are all professed fans of the band and because traces of their music of Rush can be directly found in most of these bands material. It's not high musicology, 'Ytse Jam' sounds like 'YYZ', there you go.
However, Rush were not a band infinitely bent on progress, and even if they gave that illusion during the one quantum leap in their '70s discography between the first two records and what came after, or if we're lax and consider their shift of sound towards the more streamlined, techno-pop of their '80s material a move in that same progress, it still then ended. In fact, that '80s shift in Rush is I think, emotionally, the crux of modern proghead mentality. '80s Rush found their final, adult sound and have occupied that niche since then. Progheads keep hoping that an equivalent adult metal sound will be found, but no such thing exists so far.
Furthermore, keep in mind that when Progressive Metal was in its heyday, Rush have been putting out the same record for half a decade already. Rush as an inspiration was not to push the Progressive Metal stalwarts towards infinite progress (what we instead came to call 'Avant-Garde Metal' instead, for good or worse), so... what?
It was the gradual move from the fantastic, romantic and solipsist (the domain of Heavy Metal, now and forever) towards the modernist and humanist that Rush started. Rush were an inspiration to young metalheads in the late '80s to attempt to write songs about their real and current human situation. Rush, for every 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog', for every 'Necromancer', also presented (Ayn Rand inspired, curiously but not surprisingly) paeans towards self-will and actualization, allegories towards surviving modernity and even negotiating singular identity in a mass-consumption world. These are concerns that every sentient being in the modern world has to deal with, and that's what Progressive Metal tried to introduce into the Heavy Metal cannon. The psychological reasons for such a violent shift of context in metal music in the latter part of the '80s has to do, I theorize, with the increased outsider interest in the genre and the market pressure on it. As I've said many times before, metal music felt that in the spotlight, it had to come up with something 'grownup' to say. This may sound damning but I do not necessarily think that nothing useful and artistically vital could come from such pretensions of adulthood. If anything, those that got the worst of it were not the musicians that created Progressive metal masterpieces but the naive progheads that structured their identity on the basis that their 'grown-up metal' was better than everything that came before it. Progressive metal was an open question but yet it was percieved as a final answer by many.
I've said this in different ways on Poetry of Subculture and other places, but never so clearly and directly. Progressive Metal (of that ten year period, modern prog is a different matter, which we'll get to) is not focused on endless forward movement as an end in itself, it is about the introduction of modernist themes that deal with the social human condition while using Heavy Metal tropes to achieve energy and direction. That modernist concerns are inherently confusing and sap willpower, whereas Heavy Metal music is inherently simplistic and directive are contradictions of intent and form is very much apparent and at the core of the genre.
To qualify my statements we'll have to look at a few disambiguating examples. First, let's think a bit on technicality. Much is constantly made about Progressive Metal being the technical frontier for not just metal musics but rock instrumentation music in general. Indeed if one listens to Watchtower or even Dream Theater's debut (1988-9 releases) there isn't much in popular rock music that offered such pyrotechnical display. However jazz and fusion musics were miles ahead, even then, in the pursuit of intricacy as raison d'etre. Perhaps today the two fields have been largely equalized, but listening to say, Tribal Tech, back in 1989 would put the rigid ditties of Dream Theater in some perspective. Furthermore, in the metal field it could be said that the true frontier for technical intricacy had been pushed by the many children of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, in the 'shred' sub-genre. Or from a different vantage, the barrier for information density had always been the domain of technical death metal, not Progressive Metal itself.
Could Progressive Metal players of 1985-1995 play even flashier, more dense, more intricately? That question is diverting from the important fact that even if they could, they didn't. Progressive metal, especially in its infancy, was flashy, but not too flashy. They were trying to do something with their chops that wasn't devoted to the chops themselves. They were using modern technique and equipment to express modern themes and considerations. There were much more technically obsessed types of music than Progressive Metal in that period and its only due to musically illiterate fans (it's true, the elitist progheads usually can't tell consonance from dissonance, they can only tell when 'there's a lot of notes') that the reputation of Prog is primarily one of technical overindulgence. One needs only compare a Dream Theater instrumental with any given top-player fusion jam session to see the difference in focus. Progressive Metal overplays like a nerdy but bright pre-grad university student trying to attack a subject they have burning interest in from every which way. And that interest was the human condition. Naturally, a sophomoric atmosphere is inherent in much Progressive metal due to this, but even that can have its charm.
The other issue I have to tackle is the mythos of Progressive Metal constantly having to move forward to dignify its moniker. This is a trip many Progressive Metal musicians of the early '00s (the decade of post-modern self-reflection for metal) fell into as well, eventually taking their bands and aspirations completely outside the field. Fans rejected most of these bands for their 'betrayal' while at the same time still considering the need for ever-forward progress as the definition of the sub-genre they so loved. This must have been confusing for musicians and listeners alike. Bands that have enjoyed the interest of Progressive Metal fans have instead kept to a narrower path. Dream Theater is the most striking example of a Progressive Metal band that is very conservative, almost never moves forward. But even slightly outre bands like Fates Warning, have enjoyed their lasting success for keeping to a general formula of Progressive Metal. Bands on the fast track to actual progress, like Mayfair or Depressive Age, were finished with metal in the span of one or two records. There's a reason for this: Heavy Metal can do only a few things, but it does these things great. If you try to make it hit different beats, it's a lot of work for relatively few returns. Eventually the struggling musician realizes they can actually achieve the moods they're going for without depending on distortion, solos and double bass, and they morph into the electronica or post-punk or whatever else outfit they needed to be anyway. Those that keep the metal tropes are doing it because they still love Heavy Metal for its romantic core, and that's not 'Progressive' at all.
So that's the tension inside Progressive Metal circa 1985-1995, romantic tools in the service of modernist goals. The genre was bound to suffer commercial death early on with such a volatile tension in its core. Rush circumvented implosion by dropping the romantic tropes of grand compositions and overplaying arrogance by the '80s and instead found the contemporary rock niche in which they could explore their modernist concerns and they grew a whole second audience for it.
So what of modern (post '90s) Progressive Metal? Or, to put it as its now known, "prog". That's second generation music that has had to deal with the confusion I describe above and it has had to take a stand on what it wants to be in light of such information. Most of it has tried to be all things at the same time: hyper-technical, yet constantly bastardizing the metal with outside influences, both completely left-field and at the same time rigidly conservative when it comes to Heavy Metal play structure and composition. The end result is schizophrenic: imagine Meshuggah covering U2 while Tangerine Dream supplies keyboard drones. Some people like that type of music, I personally can't stand to listen to it for long because it hasn't made a choice of focus, instead it has made its focus to not have to commit to a choice. This is the perfect music, psychologically, for people who suffer from delusions of grandeur and/or enjoy self-validation by how elite their hobbies are. At any case, not a good path in life.
Humanist arts are necessarily wimpy. They're not tough, or macho. In fact, the forces behind such stances are under the critical eye of humanism. Chauvinism, racism, sexism, inherent philosophical aspects of most romantic ways of thinking are deconstructed in every way by modernist arts. That is after all, their purpose. Watchtower have nothing in common with Exodus or any other beer-thrash band. If anything, Watchtower felt they are here to destroy this conception of what Heavy Metal music is. Now that all that stuff's in the past it's easier to see it in a docile light, but the minor revolution of Progressive metal was that it was flamboyantly weird, wimpy, nerdy... even gay, at times. Modern progressive metal that tries to be all things for all people all the time is terrified of being gay and wimpy and weird predominantly. It thinks the way to counteract that aspect of its identity is by slapping on Pantera and Meshuggah riffs to keep the image 'tough', it's schizophrenic.
Let's listen to this, the quintessential Progressive metal song, and see if we can find anything even remotely 'tough' in it:
This is not at all manly. As intercourse, this is erratic and interrupted. As rhetoric it's rambling and multifaceted, fractured thoughts going every which way. Driving pulse is sacrificed for scope and color. This song goes in many directions and it most importantly takes the most roundabout route to its destination. This is the essence of Progressive metal. It's the audio version of a painting such as this:
That struggles so not to say one thing in the most direct and clear manner, but instead to convey as many aspects of a situation, with its many actors and disparities and often even illogicality. Of course this high concept is wimpy! Machismo is a simple and heavy concept, a bold red color that destroys nuance and detail, it has no place on the page. Listen to that fractured riff, modulated through many keys and rhythms, as if Fates Warning are trying to present it in as many ways as possible, leaving it to the listener to decide, in dialogue with it. Of course the guitar sound is hollower (Rush producer being no accident) and lower in the mix, so that every voice in the mix is equal. Democracy, such an incompatible notion in dynastic Heavy Metal, yet, here it is. From this song to everything vaguely Progressive metal that came out in its shadow, these concepts and concerns are clear and bright to the educated listener.
This means that it's possible to make Progressive metal as such even today, and still keep to the formula. Indeed many bands do. The clarity of the approach should be judged on the modernist grace of the music, not on whether it's overtechnical, genre-bending or all-things-at-once carnival music. Progressive metal is judged on how it utilizes composition to augment its modern program. As the concerns of modernity have not been assuaged (and never will) so will every living popular music have a fringe aspect dedicated to it. Literal-minded metalheads will eventually need to develop the knowledge and language to understand what it is Progressive metal tried to do.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond
They say Hansi Kürsch, André Olbrich, Marcus Siepen
and one Thomas Stauch partook in its devising.
I am going to hurt you. I will try you with cruelty. On the precipice where you stand, you sicken me. A foolish step forward will plunge you into darkness and the faltering, cowardly step backwards will see you blinded forever. Platonic light at your back, endless dark cave forward. Your long shadow, like an arrow, leads you only to your death.
Yet you'll have to move, otherwise it's slow decay for you, withered entropy as the world turns. You are useless. Why where you ever born? We will see what you have to say with a tender heart only after your flesh is rent and flayed. I will not push you. It is pain that will push you.
You are sixteen, fifteen, thirteen now. Do you recognize your body? It doesn't recognize you, it doesn't submit to you, it doesn't agree with you. The face you look to every second morning is slightly different. Features move tectonically, volcanically, you burst and bleed and change and beauty is only a word. The world knows. They know you do not belong inside yourself, you are simply an impostor. A child's heart in a body half-way towards adulthood, responsibility, continuity.
Yet, at night. Interminable dreams of death and pathos, they drive you secretly to absurd rituals of dirtying and cleansing. Does your mother know what you do alone under the sheets? What does she tear down only for you to studiously build up again, day by day, in the killing light? The Iron Maiden poster you hang above your bed, how many times have you re-placed it? You do not plan to quit, do you, you sickening child? It is the picture of death, you know, that is what you put above you. There is no Christ, no savior there to crown you. There is instead a reanimated corpse, forehead struck with occult lightning. See death walking, death alive.
What is it that pulls your fantasy to death? Is it that you cannot bear the interim between childlike naivety and the responsible life of adults? Hanging in the middle, waiting for life to begin.
Let no one know with what violence you beat yourself, all bones and tendons, sickly thin. You have no friends, you only have conspirators within the Guild of the guilty. They will forget you with robust bodies and cars and jobs and normalcy, eventually, you'll see. Yet you'll remain in the middle, you know it. Your sin is aberrant, a lust for the impossible, the knowledge of something far beyond. The vital drug you take with your black sword, you rob it when you slay chaos gods trapped in plastic, vinyl, tape. You wrestle them until you forget the middle where you stand, you test wax wings in free fall. You fool, do you not know this is not how birds fly? You are crushed in black volcanic stone, sad wings destroyed, in magma you ingress. Inside your molten waters a black stone you find. It radiates wisdom, it speaks in ancient tongue
You are not a child. You are not an adult. You are forever, you never existed. Time does not exist. You are a god, With this power over time, you become a god. You will never explain it to anyone else, they will never understand. Yet, should you ever forget this way you feel, you will age and wither, you will become but another linear traveler, trajecting time in the foolishness that is two dimensions. Light at your back, long stretching shadow at the front. Kill yourself now if you are brave!
This much any mystic, any bard can tell you through ritual and song that they intuit. This is the endless quest, they who undertake it can never achieve it. Odysseus sails to Ithaka forever. His wife plundered by the mores of modernity. His son, Telemachus the idiot, he bides his time.
"Fantasy metal" adults scoff. Polyhedral, pretend pathos and distance, so much distance. Analysis, anthropology, musicology, philosophy and sport, so much sport. And humor. Let us laugh, ha ha. This is the way they take a sideways glance inside your dark pool. They pacify the wisdom that has been passed on you, they interpret it until there's nothing left but an interpretation. Power is a word. Death is a word. Art is a toy.
But I eradicate the distance. You have learned nothing. You are not an adult, your years are MEANINGLESS. Time doesn't exist. In your thoughts and in your dreams, what is always in your mind? That is all that exists. I manipulate you to that final step where everything begins. I do not believe any lie. Are you a child or are you a human, or are you what is in between? Souls travel endlessly inside the black chamber, they want to know what is outside this palace called life. I want you, faithful fool and human, to explain to me what you believe there is to this life. I will wait forever while you burn inside, for the words to come.
Now let's talk about cheese. Cheese smells funny. Synthetic orchestra strings and multi-tracked falsetto vocals and fake violins weeping thirds over parallel fifths, they smell so funny. People smell funny too. When you smell funny, people make fun of you! Mom, I don't want to go to school today, they say I smell funny. Twenty years later the adult in his perfect attire and groomed countenance, he's so worried he's going to smell funny. More wine than cheese, the idiot fabricates an Ideology of Cheese. He says he's an adult, he holds consequence in high regard (after all, it is in trying to make his new words cohere with his old words that he has arrived in this perfect mess - from childlike fear of cheese to an Ideology of Cheese), yet all I see is a nose. A nose so honed to smell cheese, I often wonder if his other senses have subdued completely to make space for his olfactory prowess. From the numberless senses the adult counts and assigns to the pity extremities on his ape-like paw, they forget the sense of wonder. They forget the sense of ambiguity, of uncertainty, the sense of a world that isn't finite because it has never started and never plans to end, it is forever.
Instead, the psycho-sexual castration of distance: I know things because I can judge them to be lacking in this or that regard. You can trust me because my judgments pile and stack, my whole identity is a series of betrayals to rationalize and the debris of disappointment. This fantasy metal is so cheesy, don't you agree? Let us instead choose this perfectly inoffensive post-metal-about-nothing-in-particular-exactly to mock rape us with its flaccid penis for a few minutes. Here', I'll turn it up to three, we don't want to upset the neighbors while we die a little, do we?
On the precipice where you stand, do you want to travel sideways into this? Perhaps you prefer the pain of further indecision instead. I knew you would.
You are ugly, you know that. But at least your face suits you. Blood shot wide eyes, and strong, wired legs, they suit you t0o. Because you'll have to take that step eventually. If we earn our face with years and our features reflect what we have lived, let's say that you didn't strive for a hound-like nose signifying decades of such scented judgment and disappointment, nor for a mouth full of rude tongue suggesting your impeccable sense of taste. So you have not yet taken the role of the perfect bourgeois consumer. Let us instead hone that hidden sense, the vision which looks in the far distance and sees the second horizon behind the globe's tall curve. Let us grow the strength of stride for the vision quest, that sacred circular trek. If there is wisdom in fantasy, if there is strength in oblivion... you know where the arrow points.
Step followed by step, inside the darkness of the self. You will lose everything on the circle back to the start, but what will you miss? I will wait here, on the stone. Forever for your answer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)